The Bear Game

Name:

The Bear Game

Company:

Sega

Model #:

N/A

Programmer:

Fred Mack

Year:

1983

Released?

No

Notes:

Displayed for the
first time at NWCGE 2006

While the real name of this demo is not known,
the EPROM label on the prototype identifies it as Bear
Game. This name is as good as any, so that’s how we’ll
refer to it in this article. As you may have already
guessed, the Bear Game features a bear. What you may not
know is that the game also features guns, large bags of money, and
umm… bee hives. You know, the usual Atari 2600 stuff.

The concept of the game is simple. Using the
gun at the bottom of the screen the player must guide the bear to
pick up all the money bags and possibly the bee hives as
well. The player has no direct control over the bear,
instead he must shoot him to get it to move in the direction he
wants. Every time the player shoots the bear it turns right,
so if the bear is moving to the left shooting it will make it face
and move upwards. Likewise if the bear is currently moving
upwards shooting it will make it turn right and move in that
direction. The bear continues to move in a direction until
it hits a wall where it will bounce off and turn the opposite
direction. The control scheme is tricky to get the hang of,
but after a while it becomes second nature. The gun
can also shoot multiple shots at once so if you’re fast on the
trigger you can get the bear to turn multiple times at once.

The game screen scrolls vertically and is actually
quite large and eventually wraps around. There are many
different maze patterns with some rather tricky wall placements
which can make collecting some of the money bags rather
difficult. One of the biggest problems is that the bear
tends to become stuck on (and occasionally in) the walls.
Thankfully the bear can generally be freed with some rapid
shooting, but this makes the whole game a bit more frustrating
than it should be. While the actual goal of the game is
unknown, once all the money bags are collected the remaining bee
hives disappear from the map. This may mean that the bee
hives were obstacles to avoid rather than be collected, but this
is purely speculation as this behavior could also be caused a
programming bug. Once all the money is collected there is
nothing left to do other than watch the bear bounce back and forth
on the walls.

Unlike most games of the time, the Bear Game is played
with paddles. However the paddles must be plugged into the
second controller port instead of the first. Although this
initially might seem like a simple programming mistake, it
was probably done intentionally. The idea being that if
the paddles were plugged into the second port, you could leave
your joystick plugged into the first port for other
games. The Sega game Tac-Scan did this as well,
which backs up the idea that the Bear Game is indeed a Sega
game. Unfortunately since this demo isn’t far along
it is really hard to speculate what else might have been
planned. There are no sounds or music in the
prototype which also points to it being an early proof of
concept rather than a nearly finished game.

According to the programmer, The Bear Game was just a
“experimental game concept” based on one of the screens
from the unreleased Sega arcade game Razzmatazz (a sequel
to Carnival). In Razzmatazz there was a screen where the
player had to shoot a polar bear to make it change directions so
that the polar bear would collect fish without falling off the
ice. The programmer thought this was an interesting
concept so he attempted to do something similar on the
2600. Unfortunately the current prototype is about as far
as he got, a second screen was planned that would have involved
the bear avoiding a large boss of some sort (similar to the
treasure room in Dragonfire) but this never got started.

So what does a bear need with money anyway? Sadly the
answer to that question is lost to the ages.